I'm With Him: In Love With Our Selfies

Don't know how you feel about a guy? Take a picture.

Some people consult psychics, others read tea leaves. On a rare occasion, you'll meet a person who finds Jesus in a potato chip. I've got a thing for pictures. When I look at a photograph, it all appears to me: the past, the present, the future, and the truth. Don't judge a book by its cover? Oh, please. Pictures tell me exactly what's up.

It's the reason I avoided being photographed with some of the men I dated in the past. Facing a camera can be unsettling. The lens looks at you and captures a truth that maybe you're unwilling to share. I could lie to myself, to my boyfriends, and to everyone else about my feelings, which were usually somewhere on the fence, but a picture of us would say otherwise. Maybe you'd see it in my smile or in the space between my body and his. You would understand. It's how everyone knew immediately that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were breaking up when they were photographed taking that last walk on the beach in Anguilla. You could tell in the shot where he kissed her. He was saying, "Thanks for the memories, babe. I'll cherish the time we spent together."

More From Cosmopolitan

Dustin appeared to me first online. His profile photo didn't tell me much. He was looking at the camera and holding a drink in one hand. He smiled, not very widely. His eyes looked partly closed under his very strong eyebrows. He seemed relaxed, self-possessed, and good-looking, but that's about all I got. Dustin didn't give anything away. Somehow it was enough for me to go on.

I learned early on that Dustin doesn't enjoy taking pictures. "They're phony," he explained. "People are posing. They're smiling even if they're not that happy."

When I showed his picture (there was only the one) to friends, they oddly kept their mouths shut. They might have said a few non-commital things so as to not offend me, like, "He looks tall," but they offered no real opinions based on his picture. One later told me she thought he had sinister eyebrows. Another said after she met him that he turned out to be much cuter in person than she'd expected.

My mom was the worst about it, obviously, saying that she didn't like his face and that she thought he would be mean to me. She said she knew it because "you can tell a lot about a person from the way they look in a picture."

The real test — the thing that I had zero control over — would be when Dustin and I took a picture together, which I waited to do because I knew he was uncomfortable. It took about a month. We were at a birthday party together. Someone with a Polaroid camera told us to smile and took our picture. The camera was old and the picture turned out dark and blurry, almost black. There was no way I was going to tell our fortunes with that.

Another opportunity came the next day when we were at a dinner party. Someone we'd just met started taking candids of us, so I asked him if he wouldn't mind taking a picture of us looking into the camera. He obliged. We posed. The man handed back my phone.

This was the moment of truth. What would I see? What kind of story would this photo tell about my future — that Dustin was my destiny? My Dustiny?

I snuck a glance without showing my phone to Dustin. I felt washed over with relief. In the picture, he looked happy. I was beaming. For real. It was official: the picture said we had potential. I could now allow myself to really think we might belong together.

"Are you kidding?" Dustin said when I confessed that I am a clairvoyant of photographs. "This is like magic. Total hocus pocus stuff."

I mean...yes? But in the months that followed that first defining dinner party photo, I haven't stopped taking pictures of us pretty much wherever we go. For one, they serve as evidence that we did things and went places. Two, it's nice to have pictures to show people when they ask to see him. I feel pride when I show them off. The fact that I want to take pictures with him at all is proof plenty.

And, I like playing picturology. Every time I press the shutter on my phone, I do my analysis of the thousands of pixels that come together to form him and me. I read what they tell me about our expressions and our body language. Every time, I come away with the same exact impression: Dustin and I are crazy about each other. Which is to say I'm clearly a better reader of pictures than my mother is. Just don't tell her I said that.